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These photographs are just a few I have taken over the last ten years at The Albany Bulb, also known as the Landfill, the Waterfront and just The Bulb. It is a place I feel passionate about. That much is obvious.
There are many of us who believe that this piece of the much hyped Eastshore State Park should have been left untouched and unmanaged - because it is a unique example of what happens when a place naturally and organically self regulates. But the dogma of 'preservation' and 'conservation areas' 'resource protection', 'habitats' and 'liability' overrules all individual identity. They cannot leave anything untouched, un-designed. It is as if if they (the park planners) didn't make it, it has no value.
Rules, guidelines, regulations, interpretive signage, fences, safety, sanctioned art - it leaves nothing to the imagination. That is what the landfill meant to us - a place of unlimited imagination.

July 30, 2011

Perhaps you're one of those good Bay Area liberals that donates to every animal cause that throws a photo of a pretty kitten in your face, or gives to the large local animal organisation because after years of giving to them they are like a comfortable relative you never see but feel an odd primal connection to. Perhaps it's that dog with the droopy, almost tear filled eyes peering out through the kennel bars in an animal shelter in a state aross the country and you grab your credit card and donate. Perhaps every time you read the words 'rescued from a high kill shelter', or 'about to be euthanised' or 'on his last day' you feel that wrenching sting in your gut you reach for your smartphone and 'share' on your Facebook page. And maybe you go a step further and volunteer at your local shelter, knowing that any one of the dogs or cats you have given your valuable time to, might be dead tomorrow. If you do any of the above, you are a damn good person.

You see an old dog on the concrete floor in a shelter, barely able to walk, with cataracts and fur falling in clumps out of her aged body and you feel inflamed. How could ANYONE DO SUCH A THING you wonder aloud, and your fellow volunteers nod in agreement. 'Dumped in the night kennel', someone says and you feel the heat of indignation rising. The numbers of sick, injured and old dogs and cats arriving in the shelters is rising and it feels lousy. I get it. I'm with you. In your mind you create the backstory. All the dog ever did was love their owner and THIS is how they are repaid, by being abandoned in the twilight of their lives without any information in an after hours Drop Box. And because the animal has entered the shelter they have to undergo a 'stray hold' which can vary from shelter to shelter but depending on the day of the week the animal came in, can be up to 10 days. And then, on the appointed day, unless one of the amazing 'rescue groups' has stepped up to take the broken pet into their system, the animal will be taken into a room where a life ending cocktail will enter her veins, and, out of the presence of an owner or guardian, the dog will die in the company of strangers. Sometimes it is a more gentle end than others.

If they can't afford to kill their pet, they shouldn't have one.

A couple of pups, drooling, thin, lethargic and oozing blood from their rear ends sit in a plasic laundry basket while the man who has found them, staggering on the sidewalk at one of Berkeley's busiest intersections, in one of Berkeley's more vulnerable neighbourhoods, enters the shelter to tell staff he has them in his car. The symptoms are damn obvious but without a test for parvo virus there is a faint chance it could be a combination of other debilitating conditions - worms, de-hydration, starvation perhaps. The staff member with latex gloves takes the swab from the anus and in ten minutes the confirmation. A strong positive for one of the nastiest viruses affecting dogs. It attacks the intestine and bone marrow and untreated will almost certainly result in an unpleasant and assaultive death. Even treatment is no certain cure. And just as bad, there is the possibility that the infected pups have been shedding virus which is so resilient it can live up to 9 months or more in soil and can be carried on the soles of shoes from one place to another and infect another set of pups. The two pups in the plastic bin are euthanised right there in the car of a good samaritan whose car is now covered in contagious blood.

If they can't even afford vaccinations for their pups, they shouldn't have them.

The phone rings with a call from a woman in Richmond, a city which has far greater probems than pet overpopulation, in a county which has one of the highest rates of foreclosed homes in California. Richmond sits just two small cities north of Berkeley, and is even closer to genteel Albany, where the schools are rated among the best in the region, and the streets of well groomed cottages and mid size homes are among the most sought after for Silicon Valley workers who can't afford San Francisco prices. The woman has a chihuahua, in fact as it turns out later, she has four chihuahuas, and one of them has given birth and is sick and the puppies are dying, and one more is pregnant, both by the one male in the house who is related to both of them. She is overwhelmed and regretful. She did not realise that dogs do not control their reproductive urges the way humans do (or can). How many times have I explained that canine brothers and sisters or mothers and sons will mate, and been met with an almost unbelieving stare.

If they can't afford to spay or neuter their pet they shouldn't have one.

In fairness to those who make those comments, they are the some of the same people who say similar things about people having children. As if there was something original or clever about suggesting that that there should be a good citizen testing station where prospective parents go to take their roadworthiness exam. But one of the most insidious suggestions made is that money is in indicator of the ability to be a good parent - to a child or to a domestic animal companion.

If they can't afford to get their dog to a vet, how can they afford to have puppies?

Yeah, money makes it easier. I can attest to that. I most certainly was not born into poverty or into a home of suffering. And while we did not have much, I don't ever remember a day when we did not eat, or when I did not sleep in a bed. Except by choice. There were years, after my parents divorce when my mum and I lived horribly close to the edge. And mealtimes were a repetition of beans on toast, or pizza dough out of a packet with some tomato sauce smeared on it. I found some carpet remnants at the back of a carpet store in town, and nailed them to the floor of our rented flat to keep the wood plank floor warm. But I went to decent schools (or I should say I went on occasion), my mum went without in order to buy curtains for my room, and I always knew inately that the middle class core of my family would win out over the temporary veneer of under-funded fallen on hard times divorcee and kid.

And we always had cats. Who ate before we did. And when one of them leapt onto the windowsill of our third story apartment and fell right through an open window and into the flower beds below, she was not taken to a vet, which would have completely out of our reach, but was placed in a box with a soft blanket and a bowl of warm milk, and we hoped for the best. 24 hours later, she hopped out of the cardboard box and came, purring deeply, into the living room where we were watching the telly with dinner on our laps in front of the blazing gas fire (which was coin operated), and jumped up and nuzzled into my armpit. Then in an instant she grabbed my toast and sardines. What my beloved cat did not survive was my mother sending me back to my father in one of the stealth moves she made when money worries and anger towards him precipitated a sudden change of scenery. One morning, a woman arrived and asked me to put my cat into a cage she gave me, and she walked out of the door with her. That moment was a defining one for me. I would never abandon an animal again.

We never fixed our animals. Did I already tell you that? Judy, our very first dog, had pups 2 or three times and we gave them to friends at school. My mother flushed down the loo the ones that seemed weak or were born struggling. I wasn't in the room. Kittens seemed to be running around all the time. And our preferred method of birth control was to get the hose turned on quickly when Judy, in heat, was being mounted by every Tom Dick and Harry in the Guillemard Valley Road neigbourhood of Kuala Lumpur, where a lot of the Europeans lived. 'Mummy, get the hose' became a familiar cry during those inexplicable times when Judy was crying in anguish and behaving strangely for two weeks. Sex Ed in our house.

If they won't spay or neuter their pet, they shouldn't be allowed to have one.

I didn't even know about spay or neuter surgery until I was in my late twenties in London when I took my cat Clara to the PDSA (People's Dispensary For Sick Animals) for the first of many UTI's, the first clues to the kidney failure to which she would eventually succumb. But by then, I had moved to San Francisco and Clara was living happily with my former roommate Sibyl.

And then it began. There was the small red pit pup chained in a yard next to our Bernal Heights building and I would watch her for hours crying for some attention, and receiving none, until one day I saw she was no longer on the chain and ran around the corner to knock on the offending door in case something terrible had happened, and there she was, loose and unattended on the street. Before I knew what I was doing she was in my arms, and in short order Rosa was into the home she lived in and was adored in until her death well over a decade later.

Given my reputation as someone who 'doesn't like' pitbulls (not my words) it might come as a surprise to people that my first dog rescue in America, in 1989, was a pit, and actually, so was my second. Driving along 3rd St in Bayview Hunters Point a black and white dog shot into the roadway in front of us, and stopped. I opened the passenger door and she leapt in. I took her to San Francisco Animal Control, where I learned a useful lesson. I brought her in and said 'I found this pitbull running loose'. They responded 'That's not a pitbull, it's a lab'. This started a five minute debate during which I insisted that this was indeed a pitbull and I knew the difference. It was then that one of the officers came around to the other side of the counter and gave me the unvarnished truth. 'Yes, of course it's a pitbull. If it comes in here, defined as a pitbull, it will get put to sleep. Call it a lab and it might have a chance at survival'. I thanked him and left. Little, as the dog was named died 16 years later, as beloved an animal as any animal could be, in the home of Julie, the sister of my then partner Susie.

There were the sick and dying cats and kittens in the yard directly behind ours, and the vet who shall remain nameless but is one of my great heroes, who came to the house and helped me trap them and literally neutered the boys on a kitchen table and took the females to the SPCA for spay and the kittens for adoption.

These are the formative and transformative moments in the life of an activist. Until there is education and information there can be no real understanding of an issue. Until there are obvious and available and accessible services there can be no solutions to problems of this kind.

Spay/Neuter should not be something out of economic reach. It is life saving. Vaccinations against deadly diseases are a social necessity. Euthanasia to end the suffering of a beloved but desperately ill or injured companion animal is not a luxury item. It is our compassionate obligation.

July 08, 2011

The news yesterday of the closure of The News Of The World, Britain's most notorious tabloid newspaper (if one can call it that) is cause for huge celebration. It is also at least 40 years overdue. No-one who has ever worked for a British tabloid can be in the least surprised by the revelations about Rupert Murdoch's flagship muck-raking rag in a wide ranging phone hacking, bribery and corruption scandal. The arrest of the editor Andy Coulson who was recently the Conservative Prime Minister's Communications Director, leads to a small glimmer of hope that Murdoch's 'Fox News' and 'News Corporation' may finally be exposed for the dangerous political sledgehammer that it is.

Murdoch, who was once merely an Australian media baron will go down in history as one of the most influential and destructive public opinion makers of the late 20th century and early 21st. Hopefully, by the time this man dies, his empire will be so discredited, and his sons so incapable of making the secret payoffs that News Corp depends on to keep the lid on the slime and sleaze, that this murky ship will sink along with News Of The World. It is hard to describe just how filthy this tabloid was. But no self respecting Fish & Chip shop ever used their pages to wrap the steaming fish dinner, you never knew what you might catch.

Hacking into the voice mails of the rich and famous, or the royal family or political enemies of Fox News and Murdoch's other media outlets was just the newest form of invasive predator journalism that has been the hallmark of the British tabloid press for decades. Before hacking, there was scanning the analog airwaves and capturing Prince Charles declaring his quirky desire to be a tampon in Camilla's vagina, or Diana making plans for an assignation with a lover. And before that was the infamous long lens, attached to a Nikon resting on the windowsill overlooking the site of a secret meet between a politician and his favorite hooker, or the football player smoking crack with a wasted fashion model on the deck of a yacht at Cannes.

This is relevant to me personally because for a short time I worked for a British tabloid, The Daily Mirror, which in spite of its Labour Party affiliations was also decried by progressives as one of the front runners in smut and smear journalism. It was known as a Page 3 paper, a reference to the topless bimbo photo they ran every day on Page 3 which according to the editors I worked with, was an important part of the identification of the paper with its working class roots. Blue collar workers, the argument went, fancied a bit of crumpet with their PG Tips drunk out of a chipped mug, on their lunch break in the factories of northern England.

It is interesting to wonder whether Murdoch, who took junk journalism to undreamed of heights, would have been so successful had the owner of The Daily Mirror, Robert Maxwell, (not his real name) not fallen off his luxury yacht for no aparent reason in November 1991. Maxwell was a Czech Jew, a survivor, and a bare knuckle bruiser in the world of international media, espionage and business. Unlike Murdoch, he fostered a left of center editorial tone in his newspapers. Neither of them could be said to have a 'free press' at the forefront of their concerns, both saw the ability to control vast tracts of unformed and uninformed voters through easy to read banner headlines and enjoyed the sense of power that came with being able to punish celebrities, politicians and the rich for their private pratfalls. Like any great competition, Maxwell, operating in the same seamy sewers might have kept Murdoch's ambitions slightly in check. Or not.

Between the years 1979 and 1982 I thought I almost had a career in photo journalism. My postcards of feminist graffiti brought me attention from publications, journals and editors around the world, the National Enquirer came calling, and I was threatened with legal action by a male model in an ad which had been re-faced. That story landed me in the pages of the Evening Standard, New Musical Express and Advertising Age. Sounds newspaper used my image of Poison Girls lead singer Vi Subversa on their cover, Tom Robinson wrote a song about me called 'Right On Sister', and I got a call from a senior editor at The Daily Mirror inviting me to join a brand new publication called Picture Mirror which was to re-create the glory days of the photo news magazines like Picture Post and Life. I was giddy.

Lunch with Keith Waterhouse and other Mirror glitterati followed where rack of lamb and red wine seemed to emerge on an unending conveyer belt from the kitchen at a Fleet Street hangout. I bumped into Anne Robinson, then Features Editor at the Mirror who suggested I do a photo story for the Music section, and after lunch that first day, without any contract in place, I was told to go to the account window on an upper floor with a sheet of paper given me by an editor and pick up a wad of cash to help me on my way. Just bring interesting pictures, I was told. Lots of them. Oh and Jill, never mind the quality, our photo retouchers can take care of that.

For a few months I was in a dream. My lesbian feminist friends wondered if I had lost all sense of propriety, how could I work for Maxwell, the Mirror, the tabloids. Through it all, I insisted I had the beast under my thumb. And for a while, I did.

In the first issue of Picture Mirror in 1981 a huge two page spread of my political graffiti images ran. Under the title 'Scrawl Of The Wild'. The captions were a little corny, a little sexist, but I felt the impact of those pictures in a major nationwide publication more than offset my nagging doubts. Walking into the back entrance to the Daily Mirror and up to the Features Department for a meeting with my editor or to drop off dozens of rolls of Ilford HP5 for the photo lab to develop, I felt close to being a real journalist and for the first time I could see myself on a different side of the barricade. And heading up the the Accounts window for the wad of cash to cover expenses, well that was just - freakin' sexy.

I came up with an idea to cover the Womens Conferences of both major political parties, and headed to Brighton for the Labour Party conference where I felt at ease with the union members, social workers, and progressives who made up the body and soul of the party. The Conference was loud, raucous, good humoured, diverse, filled with passion and laughter. I found it hard to take any photo which might show these women in a bad light. The Tories made it easier for me. A sea of blue rinsed ladies with stern faces meeting at a large hall in Westminster where Margaret Thatcher came to give a rousing 'cut spending, get off your backsides, hang 'em high, stop immigration' speech, and photographing these women as caricature was simple. And after all, I worked for a rag which always endorsed Labour. Some of them, seeing my Press credentials, turned away in disgust.

For six months, I was ecstatic. I bought another Canon A1 (the luscious black painted brass bodied camera I have etched onto my upper right arm), Anne Robinson, the famed editor (and later TV hostess of The Weakest Link) asked me to come over to her office where she dropped a hint that she was looking for a new editor for their Music column and could I please come up with 10 good photo stories for the page. I managed a meagre two stories. I just didn't have what was necessary for tabloid journalism. 'Quantity, not quality Jill' she told me. 'Just turn 'em out', they said. Shoot fifty rolls of decent stuff, not two rolls of good stuff. 'Whatever needs to be done, our photo guys can take care of the problems'. My visits to the cash dispensing window became fewer as they saw that I didn't have the right stuff.

But one senior editor decided to give it one last try. He took me to lunch to talk about a story that was gaining attention in the midday newpapers, the Evening Standard and Evening News, and he had an idea that I would be perfect to give the Mirror an edge. Over the steak and scotch (him not me), he outlined what the paper needed from their foot soldier. There were an increasing number of lesbian women getting pregnant through AID - Artificial Insemination By Donor - and outrage was growing among the conservatives that this procedure might be getting taxpayer money through the National Health Service. Never mind that queers shouldn't be having kids at all. Hostility towards AID children reached the point where women felt for their safety and that of their kids. Would I, my colleague (and now pimp) was asking, use my connection to this sub-culture, to take genuine candid shots of the women and their babies for use in a story in the Mirror. Up to that point, the newspapers had depended upon long lens stealth attacks on these alternative families, ambushing them as they left home, or picking their child up from kindergarten. The stories were among the worst type of gutter journalism, women were having to conceal their identities, cover their faces and those of their children, run from the front door to a waiting car and here I was, being asked to wipe my own lesbianism in feces for the privelege of being able to cash in on the 9th floor of the Mirror Building. My heart and my hopes cracked. Really.

I retreated back to the safety of being broke. Years later, as feminists stormed the citadels of Fleet Street, as lesbians became editors across the industry and as our revolution became co-opted by the lure of the glass ceilings across all industries, I looked back on that moment as a defining one. The moment I really did see as my decision to stay firmly on the outside. Was it a real choice though? I still don't know.

My disillusion with radical feminism, my rejection by revolutionary feminists, my being on the sex positive side of the Sex Wars, my being a butch in a movement which rejected all conceivable forms of masculinity, my torment with gender issues, my innate distrust of money and those who wield it, my complete empathy with those who are victims, with those who have no voice, my growing up (half) Jewish in Germany, my lack of any grandparents (except for my adored Granny who died when I was 15), my sense that there had been sexual boundaries crossed in my family but without the memory to back it up, my fear that I had bullied and abused my little brother, my terror of being left behind, or of leaving someone precious behind, or the animals, when we left one home after another, and my fathers sense of disconnectedness to his own history as a Jew in Germany, and my mothers visceral dislike of Germany and her strange dependence on her abusive older brother - all these things, or none of them - are the elements of outsider thinking. To be asked to betray my community, to invade privacy, to trade loyalty for cash - these were just not part of my make-up.

So the story of the News of the World making use of new technology to pursue the powerful and to embarrass the famous, to stick it to the celebrity makes me think of my brush with scum. And as Andy Coulson isn't able at the moment to bribe the Scotland Yard detectives he once hung out with, he may have to consider giving up a few names of 'higher ups' at News Corp. Working for the tabloids is like stepping in dog shit every morning, as you go to work.

I once had an amazing rejection letter from Forbes Magazine to whom I had sent some portraits for consideration. The Photo Editor wrote back that she didn't feel I could be objective enough in my photography. That my portraits, though beautiful, showed far too much empathy for my subjects to be considered journalism. I'm fine with that.